Fake Accents?

Like many others, I experienced a major shift in my life when I started at secondary school. This has been analysed by sociologists in some depth, but if you’ve been to secondary school or are at one now, you probably know the kind of thing I mean. I don’t want to dwell on that, but for me there were two new shifts, perhaps self-imposed, which actually it would help to give some context to. Let’s start a bit earlier then.

First of all, in the mid-1970s CE, my educational psychologist Dr Gray suggested I learn French. Although I expressed agreement with her, I found the specific choice of that language disappointing because it didn’t seem exotic enough to be interesting and I had already picked up Classical Greek and Latin to some extent owing to my interest in science. French was boring. It was just what all the tourists spoke and what most people on the immediate other side of the English Channel used, and also that language everyone learned at secondary school. It used the same alphabet as English (superficially, but that’s another story) and it was just kind of humdrum. I paid it no heed.

At the same time I was learning cursive handwriting in the Marion Richardson style, which so far as I can tell is the bog standard way of writing in England. I can still do it although I rarely use it, so I can illustrate it easily instead of bothering to find some royalty-free image of it:

Apologies for the low quality, but you get the idea.

I wasn’t able to write this legibly and my teacher told me to go back to printing, so I did. A couple of years later, I was at another primary school and proceeded to learn italic cursive:

This was done with a ballpoint so it doesn’t look exactly like I wrote it. I used to write with extreme pressure, so I would often split fountain pen nibs and sometimes snap pencils in half with the force I applied to the paper. Later on in that school, a rumour went around that that style of cursive was frowned upon at my prospective secondary school and over the summer of 1978, on one day in fact, I scrapped my italic style of handwriting and invented a more rounded version, which is rather similar, as it turns out, to how Round Hand was invented. This has stayed more or less the same ever since, although it’s been through phases and in particular I now use a lot less pressure when I write. When I got to the school in question, it turned out that the teachers were particularly impressed by the clarity and neatness of the style of cursive we’d been taught at that school, and moreover, many of the signs in the school were written in the rather similar Foundation Hand! Hence that was just one of those ridiculous rumours which spread among schoolchildren and there was no real reason for me to change my writing in the first place. This is quite annoying.

I’m talking about writing because in a way your handwriting style is like your voice. There’s the conscious side of what you say and how you say it, and the side which becomes second nature after a while. Analogous processes took place with oral French and English in the transition between primary and secondary school. Before the age of eleven, I spoke with a near-RP accent all the time, but due to anxiety about “fitting in”, I soon adopted the rather Cockney-sounding register my peers at school spoke with. My mother noted at one point that I’d started saying “twenny” instead of “twenty”, which was completely unconscious. A somewhat similar phenomenon happened later with French, where at first, and again it was my mother who picked up on this, my accent was impeccable and close to Parisian but after a while, partly because I felt French had been imposed upon me without any consultation and partly because the “cool” thing to do was not to use the right accent, I just spoke it with what my French teacher once referred to as a “Maidstone accent”, although that was actually a different pupil called, of all things for someone who wouldn’t speak French properly, Marcel Durier. And in fact I wonder now if his first language wasn’t French, or whether he was at least bilingual, and just deliberately pronounced it badly to fit in.

Those are, then, three examples of language use in a child being influenced socially. In each case it was primarily conscious and intentional on the whole. I was unaware of saying, for example, “twenny”, so it wasn’t completely so, but there was a tendency. Each time it was about pressure to conform, though mistakenly so in one case. Things were very different later in my life. By the time I left home and moved to the English East Midlands, I was very conscious of my accent and of the contrast with those of others at university, who were from all over Britain and beyond, and also with the Leicester and Leicestershire accents, which are not the same. I found myself consciously adopting Midland patterns of intonation and altering some of my long vowels and diphthongs, and for some reason making my accent rhotic, to the extent that when I first spoke to Christine Battersby she thought I was American. But I was doing all this deliberately. In fact I’m so intensely conscious of my speech at all times that almost nothing has changed in my basic English since I was eighteen, and I’ve reverted to near-RP. The one exception is that because I was unaware of the division between the way contractions are used between the North and South of England, I now use Northern constructions like “I’ve not” rather than Southern ones such as “I haven’t”. That one got away from me. I do remember at some point a couple of years after I moved to Leicester noticing my use of a rounded short U (as in “bus”) instead of the usual Home Counties “ah” sound (which incidentally I pronounce differently than most Southerners) on the single occasion it occurred, and I “corrected” it. It’s still habitual for me to use glottal stops for intervocalic T’s although I rarely do so.

Most of the time, even though it’s unlike that of those around me, I still speak with a near-RP accent and feel no pressure to do otherwise, although I tend to mumble. This changes, however, when I go to Scotland. I continue to use my usual accent but feel acutely conscious of its drawly and lax quality, and it feels uncomfortable to talk like that. This is probably due to having recent Scottish ancestry. This, also, introduces a complication.

Scots is a separate Ingvaeonic language than English. The other Ingvaeonic languages are sometimes clearly separate, such as Frisian, and sometimes not, as with Bislama and Tok Pisin. Yola I don’t know about so much because it’s extinct, but it seems to have been written rather like English but spoken very differently. Scots is more complicated because it exists on a continuum from Scottish English to Scots the language itself. If I were to speak French nowadays, I would attempt to do so in a somewhat Parisian accent although I also pronounce the final usually silent E’s because I don’t like the dominance of Parisian French and feel it links it more to other Romance languages and Anglo-Norman if I do that. Nonetheless, it feels incumbent upon me to make an effort out of respect for the speakers of another language at least to try to pronounce it well, although it probably isn’t very good. It also just feels lazy not to do so. Interestingly, I’ve been perceived as speaking French with a German accent and German with a French accent, so presumably I should speak Alsatian.

It’s more complicated when it comes to the indigenous Scottish languages. Two or three of them are long dead, namely the Orkney and Shetland Norns and the disappointingly P-Celtic Pictish, which was previously thought to be non-Indo-European and possibly related to Basque. The other three are yet quick: English, Scots and Gàidhlig. I include English here because there is a Scottish variety of English as well as Scots. The two are distinct. Scots, for example, is not spoken in the Highlands, the Western Isles or the Orkneys or Shetlands, but it is spoken in the Northeast and in the Central Belt and various other places. People often seem to find it hard to accept Scots as a valid language, but are fine with Gàidhlig except that this too forms a continuum with other forms of the language, this time geographically. The Scottish government also seems to promote Gàidhlig much more actively than Scots. I have talked about Scots elsewhere (or possibly here as I seem to have had two goes at it). It’s far more widely spoken than Gàidhlig and is therefore not endangered, but the Scots themselves tend to treat it as a bit of a joke.

I would never say /lɒk/ for “loch”, but I don’t say /ɫɔχ/ either. I do, however, say /lɒχ/, and just as using “er” for the French «eu» would be insulting to the French, saying /lɒk/ sounds insulting and ignorant, rather like the American “nucular” or “kie-odo” (for Kyoto). It shows no respect for the ethnicity or culture involved. But as a Sassenach, there’s a problem, as there is with my use of the word “Sassenach” itself: it also comes across as culturally appropriative, like a White person putting on a Caribbean or African American English accent, or what I imagine that might be. I would never do that of course, as it’s like blackface and deeply insulting, but there are also plenty of White Caribbeans with the former accent. A few words here and there do come naturally to me, such as “amn’t”, which is just logical, “aye” and also, as I recently become aware, I wasn’t originally in the habit of calling a small watercourse a “stream” or “beck”, because by a strange happenstance the Kentish dialect words are “nailbourne” and “bourne”, or at least they were when I was growing up. Hence I could easily authentically uncover my habitual tendency to call a burn a “bourne”. Calling it a “nailbourne” would presumably raise eyebrows. It’s also presumably the case that the glottal stops I picked up from my father’s speech also occurred in his own father’s speech, since he was Glaswegian, though whether they were directly transmitted that way is another question.

Considered more generally, using Scots or a Scottish accent a lot of the time would appear to be an affectation for me more than something which is likely to evolve organically without my attention, since I closely scrutinise my speech much of the time. I’m also likely to sound fake even if I tried to do it, and it could also come across as mockery. On the other hand, it seems extremely grating and condescending to refuse to speak Scots, as opposed to Scottish English, without trying to use the phonetics of that language. In general, I do try to pronounce place names as they’re pronounced by the people who live there, so for example there’s a Beaconsfield Road in Leicester which I say with a short E but everyone else says with a long one. Beaconsfield is in Buckinghamshire, where my father’s side of my family lived. It would be weird to call it “Beeconsfield Road”. Why would I do that? On the other hand, it’s been a while since I’ve said “nailbourne” because people in the English Midlands are completely unfamiliar with that word.

For an unknown reason, the vocabulary I’m used to shows divergence from standard British English. I don’t use it at the moment because it sounds American. I don’t know either if it’s inherited from a Scottish origin or something else. I used to refer to meals, in order, as “breakfast”, “dinner” and “tea”, but I think that’s more a class thing than a nationality one. I also called a sofa a “couch” and a living room a “lounge”, and said “mad” when I meant angry. I don’t particularly associate any of these with Scottish English and have never checked. They’re probably all class things actually. Other things have a different history. “Amn’t” happens because “Aren’t I” sounds really ungrammatical and peculiar to me for reasons of consistency. “I’ve not” and the like for “I haven’t” is a rare example of genuine unmonitored drift. I neither know which (whether?) way round that happens in Scotland nor elsewhere in the English-speaking world.

In Scotland, there’s also a difference between the usage of “shall” and “will” and “should” and “ought to”. Among the vowels is the rather perplexing use of an “ah”-type vowel for the short U in the same places as near-RP as opposed to the rounded vowels used in northern England. I find this very strange, but it does mean that certain aspects of my accent are coincidentally more like Scottish accents than the Leicestershire ones. In braid Scots, that vowel has become “I”, as in “mither” as opposed to “mother”. Some of the variations are simply due to the existence of a distinct legal system and government, so for example I am currently in a quandary about whether to call Dumfries a “burgh”. I presume that’s a merely historical detail which has been wiped out by historical changes and everyone calls it something beginning with a T and ending in an N. Getting back to accent, although my impression is that this is almost absent everywhere nowadays, I once distinguished between “w” and “wh” in speech and somewhere deeply buried it’s still natural for me to do this. Recently this led to me calling it “Whitby” rather than “Witby”, which probably a lot of people thought was strange and an affectation, but I can assure you it’s genuinely part of my original accent. They seem to be lost, but for a short period from 26th July 1980 to around April 1982, I kept a spoken diary on cassette which preserves something like my original accent. The big difference is that it’s very clearly enunciated.

It seems that there are two different approaches to accents used by actors. One is the straightforward phonetic technique of simply transposing one’s own phonemes into those used by speakers with that accent, but apparently this is only rarely used, unnecessarily laborious and prone to slippage. The other is to hold the speech organs in a particular set of positions whence the accent emerges as a matter of course. Liverpudlian can be taken as an illustration. If an actor is from London, they can reproduce such an accent by relaxing the soft palate and bringing the back of the tongue closer to it. Likewise, the vowel shift present in New Zealand and Australian accents is generally in the same direction for each vowel, suggesting that holding the tongue in a consistent position compared to a near-RP accent would enable someone with such an accent to sound more Ozzie or Kiwi, and conversely for someone from Australasia to sound like they’re from London. This approach doesn’t work perfectly of course. For instance, the voicing of intervocalic T in Australian English is not likely to result from this.

This brings me to the remarkable phenomenon of Foreign Accent Syndrome. This is a neuropsychological condition where someone ends up sounding like their accent has changed. What isn’t clear to me here is whether the accent also sounds that way to someone with the purported accent or it just sounds like that to people without it. This can occur as a result of a stroke, a migraine, epilepsy medication or on one occasion a tonsillectomy. I’m going to describe it first naïvely with an imaginary case history. A woman speaks with a Cockney accent, has a stroke and recovers fine, but is then perceived as speaking with a Scottish accent. My naïve understanding of this situation is that the stroke affected the part of her motor cortex, changing how she uses her speech organs in a way which makes her sound Scottish to her Londoner friends. For instance, the way she holds her tongue may be tenser than before and it may not move as much when she attempts to pronounce diphthongs. It’s similar to how a stroke might affect someone’s gait, and presumably handwriting, except that different muscles are involved.

However, this may not be what’s happening. I’ve now carefully listened to two Australians who appear to have acquired an Irish accent, and in both cases the long O began with /o:/ and didn’t seem to be a monophthong, but their accent also became rhotic, which is very hard to explain in this way. Rhotic accents do sometimes have hypercorrection where, for example, an R might be inserted after the A in “china”, but in general this is taken to be a sign of a fake accent and these Australians’ accent went from being non-rhotic to properly rhotic without hypercorrection. For instance, they would pronounce the R in “first” and “mother” but not an R at the end of “dahlia” at the end of a sentence. This is highly perplexing.

People with foreign accent syndrome face many challenges. One is that accent can be an important part of self-identity. Another is that they can be seen as mocking someone with that accent, as might occur if a White English person whose accent has acquired a Caribbean sound to other people of their ethnicity converses with a Black person of Caribbean heritage whose accent has always been like that. Thirdly, it can be seen as fake and an affectation, or as attention-seeking. These particular objections remind me of the prejudice which used to exist against left-handedness, which tended to be given psychoanalytical explanations such as the person in question being anti-conformist or defiant in some way. Finally, it might expose them to prejudice and active racism. The fact that, presumably, any person able to speak fluently could come down with foreign accent syndrome might give actively racist people pause for thought.

Brain scans do in fact show that there are differences in brain activity for people with this issue, and I’m now going to dive into a less naïve approach. The syndrome is rarely diagnosed, averaging cases in single figures per decade, and appears to be connected to the function of the cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for, among many other things, coördination, timing and smoothness of movement, so it seems clear that this is a factor, although it still seems odd that someone’s accent could become rhotic as a result of this, so I don’t feel this is the whole answer. Two-thirds of diagnoses of foreign accent syndrome are made for females. Less surprisingly, they are made in adults. There is often recovery and musical approaches can be successful. The speaker themselves does perceive the accent as foreign.

This phenomenon sounds to me as if it involves the same kind of foreign accent production as an actor placing their speech organs in a particular state such as tension or relaxation. Hence maybe when an accent rubs off on someone, it occurs in a similar manner, perhaps in the way someone’s posture might come to mirror someone else’s.

This raises a second issue. Effectively, both writing and speech, and also signing, involve the use of a very specific set of finely controlled muscles. Other muscles are involved in other social and other aspects of life, such as dancing, Yoga asanas, sporting activities and generally how people hold themselves. Again there are contrasting approaches to this, one involving conscious training that becomes unconscious, the other involving a kind of suggestion, namely the Alexander Technique. The approach to adopting an accent that involves training on individual phonemes seems less like Alexander Technique than the “acting” approach, where a general Gestalt is adopted. If one small set of movements changes, it can affect the way practically every movement is made. Perhaps the same applies to language and handwriting, on smaller and larger scales. Maybe if my handwriting changes, it reflects other, deeper changes in myself, and likewise if I change the way I speak, I also move differently in other ways. This could also work the other way: grosser changes in movement lead to changes in voice and writing. This is where it impinges on the vexed question of graphology, widely regarded as a pseudoscience. Surely it would be odd for someone’s handwriting not to reflect their personality? Does this also mean that people speaking different languages might also move differently?

Moreover, we do not generally criticise people for attempting to improve their posture or perhaps surrendering themselves to suggestion in this area, so why would we criticise someone as such for attempting to change their accent. Granted, there are issues such as why someone would adopt “Mockney” or pretend to be posher than they are, and there’s the question of appropriation, but what’s the issue about faking it until you make it in that particular area? Maybe there is one, and I mean that. It could really be that I’m missing something here, and I’d be very interested in hearing your views on this.

International Day Of Yoga

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Today is International Day Of Yoga. There is a sense of dis-ease about this but on the whole it seems positive. But what is Yoga? Something which is spelt with a capital letter for a start, but apart from that, what?

The tired and tested answer to this question always seems to begin with the sentence “Yoga means ‘to join'”, and of course it does, in Sanskrit, cognate with the English word “yoke” and the Greek ζεῦγμα, in this case representing union between individual consciousness and the divine. This is where it starts to get complicated so I’m going to explain the way I understand it and summarise my history with it.

Yoga is a practice based on a fundamental aspect of the Cosmos and consists of a balance, appropriately enough, between the mental and the physical, or more accurately, practical. By one account there are seven limbs: Raja, Hatha, Karma, Jñana, Bhakti, Tantra and Mantra. This is not a definitive list as there are different versions of it and the word Yoga can have other words appended to it such as Pranayama, Kundalini and Laya. Hatha Yoga is the well-known practice of asanas, which is what many people seem to think of when they hear the word “yoga”. This is stuff like surya namaskara, padmasana, halasana, gomukhasana, cakrasana etc. Some yogis disapprove of Hatha Yoga because they think looking after the body is an obstacle to transcending it, and whereas I disagree with that I also think it demonstrates how far from Yoga the practice has come in the West. Raja Yoga is meditation, Karma practical action such as housework and the general discipline of selflessness as a route to transcendence. Jñana the word is cognate with the Greek γνῶσις and the English “know”. It’s the Yoga of knowledge in the sense of enquiry into one’s own nature beyond the ego. Bhakti Yoga is the Yoga of the emotions and devotion, exemplified by Radha and Krsna and their relationship. I see Tantra as the Yoga of self-indulgence, and to be honest I’m uncomfortable with it. it may be unfair for me to describe it in that way. Finally, Mantra Yoga is the repetition of phrases to capture their essence as a path to enlightenment. As for the others, pranayama is a collection of breathing exercises and techniques, Kundalini focusses on the ascent of the coiled energy at the base of the spine through the other cakras and Laya is the dissolution of inner being into the Cosmos via meditation. These last two aren’t really limbs, and are also very similar to each other or the same.

I started the practice of Hatha Yoga quite a long time before I should’ve done in about 1971 CE when I was four. This happened because there used to be a TV series on Sunday mornings I think. Through most of the 1970s, I was somewhat aware of Yoga and in 1978 or so I got various Yoga books out of the library and started practicing it regularly and seriously. After that, in about 1980 I bought James Hewitt’s ‘Teach Yourself Yoga’ and followed that assiduously. My mother became worried that I was pursuing it as a religious practice, as I also did things like practice the kriyas and meditation, and also at that time the London Healing Mission began its campaign against Yoga and various other practices it regarded as occult and Satanic. Because my mother was an evangelical Christian, this was quite a strong influence on my life, and the organisation was insisting that people burn all their “occult” books and beg God for forgiveness for following the ways of Satan. This to my mind at the time, not yet being Christian, was just dangerous nonsense, and actually Satanic in itself. I tried to introduce some of my friends to it, but as a young teen I was probably a bit too keen on showing off for it to be appropriate for Yoga. I didn’t go veggie at the time either, although I considered it. I was keen on the idea that it should be done as an alternative to sports in my secondary school but didn’t pursue this thought. Many decades later, I wrote this idea up as a story. The problem was that I never received any formal instruction in Yoga, and in fact I didn’t go to a Yoga class until the 1990s. One possible legacy of this is that some of my joints are not in perfect condition, but this is not Yoga’s fault so much as me doing asanas when I was a child and my body was still developing, and because I didn’t have any education from others in it. Had I actually successfully campaigned for the inclusion of Yoga in my school, things would probably have been very different. I don’t know what position Yoga had in secondary education at that point. Funnily enough, I did have formal instruction in Tai Chi at the end of the ’80s, at Warwick Uni.

Yoga was, however, one of those things which stayed with me, and I did incorporate some of it into my everyday life such as pranayama, meditation and a handful of asanas. Later on, marrying Sarada made a big positive difference to how I practiced, although by then I did sporadically practice a series of asanas every morning and had been since about 1991.

I think of Yoga as part of the fundamental fabric of reality and the practice of it as in some ways akin to using the principles of physics to design an electronic device. I don’t think it “belongs” to anyone and don’t understand how it could. This brings up the first really depressing issue to do with Yoga: claiming intellectual property rights on it. This has been done a few times, notably by Bikram Choudhury, notorious for the claims of sexual assault in his classes, so to be ad hominem for a moment maybe this is the degree of enlightenment someone who would attempt to patent Yoga has. On the other hand, good sequences can be arrived at by people which are worth promoting.

I’m going to take a break from this more abstract stuff to describe my practice of Hatha Yoga this morning, after going for a run. I began, as I usually do in recent decades, by relaxing in Savasana, corpse posture. This is simply lying supine with relatively abducted limbs and relaxing. A very long time ago indeed, I induced a post-hypnotic suggestion which enables me to relax completely in this position immediately, but the usual practice, and perhaps a more mindful one, is to pass over one’s body either from head to toe or vice versa and relax muscle groups. Before I used Savasana, I used what I think is called the “spinal rock”, which is where you roll yourself into a ball on your back and rock back and forth. I followed this with Sarvangasana, the shoulderstand. A useful way to think about this is to imagine your body is a candle with your feet as the candle flame, which reminds you to keep it vertical. I usually do the supported shoulderstand and go immediately into Halasana, the plough. Since I was doing this in a small room and I’m 178 centimetres tall, I wasn’t able to touch the floor with my feet and in fact there is a general issue with being able to do asanas at all in this house because of how we’ve arranged the furniture. Space is just rather limited. I think there are supposed to be, in imperial, fifty square feet available per person practicing asanas. I then did a twist, Jathara Parivartanasana, although a variant where one reaches across with one’s free arm. Although counterposes are important, on this occasion I didn’t consciously do any, although I did do Jathara Parivartasana both ways round.

I’m having some difficulty describing the actual experience of doing asanas because it’s very much in the area of proprioception and various sensations which are hard to verbalise. One thing which is easier to verbalise is the cracking and clunking sounds and sensations one may get in one’s joints in the process. I wonder, in fact, whether it’s even a good idea to attempt to verbalise it in that way. At one point in the ‘noughties after doing quite a bit of Hatha Yoga, I became acutely and constantly aware of how I distributed my weight between my legs. I found that intrusive and unwelcome.

Vajrasana and a superficially similar asana where one stretches one’s arms above one’s head palm to palm came next. It’s an issue for me, and probably other people, that asanas can appear identical to an untrained observer while involving completely different balances of forces, and this is not problematic in this case but the fact that I’ve described these two as similar illustrates this possible confusion. They are not in fact similar. The version of Vajrasana I usually do is not the one where you put your hands behind your back in a prayer position but the much simpler one involving placing one’s hands upon one’s knees and tensing one’s whole body. The asana involving raising one’s arms above one’s head also involves kneeling but the emphasis is on stretching upward. Simhasana came next, which is the kind of thing one probably would prefer to do alone, or at least I would, due to self-consciousness relating to the facial expression. I always follow Vajrasana with Simhasana. This I then followed with Supta Vajrasana, partly because I wanted to have something to do a counterpose I actually knew to. In fact I didn’t touch my head to the floor on doing this, but there is a central focus in Hatha Yoga as many people, at least in the West, practice it, that one avoid “end-gaining”, which is perhaps a good general principle whereby one should live much of one’s life. This principle is actually from Alexander Technique, and amounts to the ends justifying the means in practical terms: getting there is definitely not half the fun if you’re end-gaining, and there can therefore be a lack of self-awareness involved. It was also the case, for different reasons, that my feet didn’t touch the floor during Halasana, but this doesn’t matter. That said, repeated and balanced practice of asanas can involve such events occurring. I’m avoiding saying “achievements” here. This issue will come up later in a wider context.

Supta Vajrasana I followed with Balasana, which I think is Suptasya Vajrasanasya counterpose. A counterpose is close to the inverse of another asana, or rather they’re each others’ inverses, with the same muscle groups and joints in the opposite states. Balasana, like Halasana and Sarvangasana, are inverted poses where the head is lower than the heart, which often means that the uterus is higher and should therefore be avoided during menstruation. Even after all this time, I’m not convinced that inverted poses are beneficial because it seems to me they put too much pressure on the cerebral circulation. Then again, it could be a case of “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and it can make sense to put the body under stress.

Next came Bhujangasana. This is one of two asanas I find very confusing, or in this case rather I used to. Bhujangasana involves flexing the spine while supporting oneself with one’s arms from a prone starting point. This looks exactly the same to me as pushing up with the arms until the back is curved dorsally, but as I understand it, the spine pulls up from the floor while the arms may almost be dangling from the shoulders and resting on the floor. I’m aware that I’m saying “floor” here when I might have said “ground” or “earth”, and I did in fact practice indoors. I’m also not saying “mat”. More of that later. Although I usually follow this with Dhanurasana, this time I didn’t.

Following Bhujangasana came the for me notorious Adho Mukha Śvānāsana (oh look, diacritics and everything – I copypasted that particular term). This is an asana I find utterly confounding, as some people know. It’s the Down Face Dog, and I included it in today’s session because I wanted to indicate its utterly confusing nature to me. My issue with Adho Mukha Svanasana is that its appearance gives no indication at all of how one is “supposed to be” distributing the forces in one’s body. It’s entirely unclear to me most of the time whether the hands are supposed to take the weight or the legs, essentially. I’m vaguely aware, and very willing to be corrected on this, that the general idea seems to be that one is reaching forward rather than resting on one’s arms and hands, but I find this so difficult that this asana is really off-putting to me. It casts doubt on whether I’m doing any other asana “properly”. I’m also aware that the language I’ve used in this paragraph kind of contradicts the general idea of avoiding end-gaining.

I followed Adho Mukha Svanasana with Trikonasana, which is fairly straightforward in comparison, and my final asana was Tadasana, and yes this does mean that I didn’t go back into Savasana at the end. More generally, this is just a hastily thrown together ad hoc session of asanas which is not particularly balanced or rationally planned. Some of them were included simply so I could write about them here. My sessions are not always like this. I should also mention that the different stages of asanas are accompanied by inhalation and exhalation, which serve to time the pace at which they are undertaken. Particular ratios of breathing and styles of doing so, in other words pranayama, can also be involved. It was notable that when I practiced in a class, I was initially much faster than everyone else, but after a few months I ended up being slower than everyone else, for this reason, which is surprising because I’m also aware that I breathe unusually slowly in other situations.

Regarding the surface I practice on, I rarely use a mat. This is because mats are usually padded, and this makes it harder to balance. Vrksasana is a good illustration of this issue, because standing on one leg is much harder on a yielding surface than a firm one. I think it’s usual practice to do asanas barefoot. Doing them on the first floor as opposed to the ground floor also feels psychologically peculiar to me because of the space I’m aware of beneath me – I don’t feel grounded. Ultimately the approach I would feel most comfortable with is to do it on a lawn, beach or meadow, i.e. a place where I’m in direct contact with Earth. Another aspect of using a mat is that it’s a material possession. This is also why I sometimes do asanas naked, but this basically means doing them indoors.

It’s important to be aware of two things relating to Hatha Yoga. One is that it’s only one aspect of Yoga and separating it from the rest of the approach can be inappropriate. Another is that recently there’s been a change in how people view Yoga. Perhaps in the past, if someone asked what kind of Yoga one practiced, one might say Hatha, Raja, Pranayama and so forth. More recently they would be more likely to expect one to refer to some kind of branded and commercialised practice such as Bikram, though probably not that specifically because of the scandals surrounding it. To me, those don’t even seem to be Yoga at all because of their involvement with global capitalism and their marketing, which would appear to take Karma Yoga completely out of the picture.

All of this contrasts dramatically with the recent Indian approach. Yoga is classed as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, and this opens up the possibility of cultural appropriation but also of ethnonationalist exploitation, and it’s this last which has led to the creation of International Day Of Yoga by Narendra Modi. The fact that this is also the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere is not coincidental, having special significance in many cultures. The idea has many positives, and it is not, of course, up to the West to decide what should be done with Yoga, but it’s also quite reminiscent of the idea that Indo-Aryan languages are the original Indo-European languages and that the Aryans originated in South Asia. There are plenty of reasons why this latter cannot be so, for instance the presence of retroflex consonants in Vedic Sanskrit and the levelling of vowels to schwa in the same, and a similar issue is the promotion of Yoga as an Olympic sport. Yoga is widely perceived as about self-acceptance, being non-judgemental and not comparing oneself and others. There has actually been a Yoga Asana Championship in New York City. Whereas there’s no denying that a particular execution of an asana has aesthetic appeal, to me all of this is anathema to Yoga. The only way I can make sense of it is to wonder if the West has done something to the values of Yoga which meant that the likes of end-gaining were actually originally part of the tradition and have been lost. However, whether or not this is so, it’s hard to see where spiritual aspects of Hatha Yoga would come into this and it seems to have filtered out the whole of the rest of Yoga, such as Raja. Could there be such a thing as competitive samadhi?

On the other hand, what are Olympic ideals? The modern revival of the Olympics at least seems to have positive aspects, involving the replacement of warfare with athletic contests, and presumably sporting ideals regarding “how one plays the game”. It’s also the case that the modern Olympics originally included more than sport, encompassing for example town planning and architecture, and there are also exhibition sports. It still seems utterly bizarre to me that Yoga, by which Hatha Yoga seems to be meant, could be part of it, particularly in its current rather corrupted state.

I mentioned the London Healing Mission early on in this post. I have to tread a thin line here because, being Christian, I’m aware of certain attitudes towards Yoga and actions against it which pertain to specific people and small organisations which I don’t want to criticise publicly, but there have been quite public denouncements of the practice by Christians too. Some of these correspond to the Indian emphasis on Siva and the idea that it’s a spiritual path which does not include the saving power of Christ. This, to be fair, is at least levelled at Yoga as a whole rather than just Hatha Yoga, so in a weird way Christian opposition to Yoga has a more accurate view of it than the popular understanding of it. I am of course Christian, and I’ve even had tendencies towards being “that kind of Christian”, but I think there are elements of racism for some people, though not all, in this opposition. I do, however, have a remedy based on what might be termed the metaphysics.

The diagram which started this post has Samkhya as an early source for what I would call the discovery of Yoga, and Vedantism is another approach. “Vedanta” means “end of the Vedas”, and that source can also be seen in the diagram. Vedanta attempts in various ways to articulate the implications of the Upanisads, Bhagavad Gita and Brahma Sutras. Vedanta universally accepts reincarnation, moksa (also known as nirvana) as an ideal, karma as resulting from agency, a God-like first cause of the Cosmos, the Hindu scriptures as the best source of knowledge and the rejection of Buddhism, Jainism, Samkhya and Yoga itself. Hence with the Vedantist approach to Yoga, clearly some careful approach needs to be taken to understanding due to the fact that it rejects Yoga, but for a Christian it would seem to require unity between God and Isvara or Brahman. Although I do believe this is so, I don’t have complete confidence in the fact and in any case because Christianity for me involves intense personal focus on God through Christ, even to think about whether Hinduism is or is not antithetical to Christianity would only be relevant to me if I were actually Hindu myself, which I’m not, so I withhold judgement.

Consequently, I believe in Samkhya as the philosophy behind Yoga and see it as expressing fundamental truths about reality. Samkhya is atheistic, but I adopt it because I’m theist. Samkhya is atheistic because God cannot be observed and karma is a sufficient ruling principle in the Universe. I would prefer to see God as withdrawing from a portion of reality to allow the physical Universe to exist. This is the Jewish philosophical concept of Tsimtsum, “contraction”, which posits that G-d allows a finite, vacant space, “ḥālāl happānuy”, to exist in which physical events occur. Within this space, Samkhya operates, with its division between prakrti and purusa, “nature” and “consciousness” respectively. Also within it operate the three gunas, known as sattvas, tamas and rajas, positivity/vitality, dynamism and inertia, which initially condense separately out of primordial harmony and work themselves through, ultimately but temporarily becoming re-unified. This period of working out is the history of our current Universe. Yoga is based on this, seeing the jiva as a situation where purusa is in some form bound to prakrti. The gunas are present in all beings in different proportions, and are manifested in the practice of Yoga, for instance tamas is in my reluctance to do asanas first thing in the morning (tamas), and in other areas of my life such as procrastination or not wanting to tidy up. I’d venture to claim that tamas is in fact another name for thanatos, the death instinct. Rajas and sattvas can also be understood very prosaically in the practice of asanas. It’s well-known that Hatha Yoga makes one fart. This is technically understood as the action of rajas on the digestive system. It doesn’t have to be considered to be off somewhere in a mystical realm of some kind. Likewise, nothing I’ve said about Samkhya should contradict either empirical science or the Christian or other faiths.

Yoga is an extremely large topic and it’s hard to do it justice under pressure of time, so I will close with an observation made about cakras. Cakra is Sanskrit for “wheel” and is also cognate with that English word and the Greek “kyklos”. There often seems to be a lot of scorn piled upon the concept, but as I’ve said, nothing in Yoga or Samhya contradicts science, including medical science, and there is a particular way of understanding them which harmonises them quite easily. Each cakra is associated with an endocrine organ and with an inflexion point in the spine, including the cranium as part of that, thus:

Cakra name	Axial skeletal point	Endocrine organ
Muladhara	Tip of coccyx	Adrenal cortex
Svadisthana	Sacrum	Gonads
Manipura	L3 (most ventral lumbar vertebra)	Endocrine pancreas
Anahata	T6 (most dorsal thoracic vertebra)	Thymus
Visuddha	C7	Thyroid
Ajña	Occiput	Pituitary (both)
Sahasrara	Crown of skull	Pineal

The thing about this list is that it can be declared by fiat. Cakras can be seen as simply referring to at least this trio of association while remaining agnostic about the rest, or they can be extended. Claiming that they don’t exist is therefore foolish. Moreover, each of these inflexions of the spine is mechanically significant and connected to our evolutionary history. Brian Aldiss refers to “rational yoga” in his mainstream novel ‘Life In The West’. Very many aspects of Yoga can be understood rationalistically without contradicting scientific understanding, particularly with a Samkhya-based approach, and for this reason I adopt this approach. It’s particularly compatible with Abrahamic religion too, because it fits with a God who maintains the physical Universe through Tsimtsum.

However, there is one final irony here. After repenting and committing myself to Christ, I almost immediately fell away due to factors such as homophobia and opposition to veganism and Yoga. I also assiduously avoided raising the Kundalini because it was widely regarded as dangerous by yogis themselves. Then one day in the mid-‘nineties at Leicester Friends’ Meeting House, I went to a yoga session whose focus was on raising the Kundalini, and it led to two things: the intense presence of other Christians in my life and ultimately my return to the Christian faith. There is a pattern of this kind of thing happening in my life, and I definitely do not explain it through metaphysical naturalism.

Happy International Day Of Yoga!

The Baader Meinhof Effect

Or is it Bader Mindhop? Imagine a disabled RAF pilot who, rather than applying himself to getting back in a plane, overcomes his disability through Yogic mental training and spiritual discipline, ultimately achieving Qephitzat ha-Derekh, and acquiring the ability to teleport using his mind alone. Were he then able to train others in this siddhi, maybe the War would’ve been brought to an end much sooner. The Bader Mindhop, as it is known, or was to me as a child, was what I imagined Baader Meinhof to be when they began to make themselves known in the early ’70s. They are, coincidentally perhaps, also known as the RAF – the Red Army Faction. Perhaps their ability to teleport psychically would’ve been used to gather intelligence and undertake sabotage and robbery, but the question there is, does one retain one’s siddhis if one becomes morally corrupt? Would that even have been moral corruption or were they heeding a higher ethical call than most?

I think I was probably influenced by ‘The Tomorrow People’ in this opinion. In case you don’t know, ‘The Tomorrow People’ was an ITV children’s series broadcast from 1973 to 1979 and later remade in I think the ’90s. I didn’t watch much of it as we were a decidedly BBC household, but we did read a novelisation in English class around ’79. I get the feeling it was indirectly trying to rip ‘Doctor Who’ off, although it doesn’t actually seem that similar, but it may have been more so back in the day. In the series, Homo superior is beginning to evolve in the form of adolescents who find themselves able to perform the 3 T’s of telekinesis, telepathy and teleportation, also known as “jaunting” after the Alfred Bester novel ‘The Stars My Destination’. It would be very flattering to a teenager of the time to be able to think of themselves as special in that way, and apart from anything else it’s in keeping with the focus on New Age ideas prevalent in youth culture at the time. It also places it in that line leading from Olaf Stapledon via Arthur C Clarke to David Bowie, which I’ve mentioned before on here.

Hence the question forming in my mind right now is this: if one is able to achieve some kind of higher plane of spiritual existence, would that all collapse if one abused any power one had, or are the two somehow compatible in a way we mere human-basics fail to understand? Alternatively, are siddhis actually inevitably associated with spiritual enlightenment or is that a version of the just world fallacy? Qephitzat ha-Derekh, the ability of a rabbi to travel without moving, seems only to occur on a need-to-do basis. One can only achieve it if it accords with the Divine Will. But is this really true? I can easily see that if someone was required for a ritual, or unable to reach home before the sunset that begins the Sabbath, they might find themselves miraculously in the divinely-required location, perhaps having travelled a great distance in less than the expected period of time. The aforementioned Arthur C Clarke once brought up the possibility that if Ha-Shem could be everywhere at once, rather than having to obey the apparent laws of physics and the ultimate speed limit imposed by the velocity of light, maybe we too could avail ourselves of that power, since in Clarketech “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

During the Cold War, the CIA and KGB both tried to investigate and develop psionic powers but were also said to be unable to do so. Whereas this could just be put down to the plausible likelihood that they don’t exist, another possibility emerges. Maybe they couldn’t do it because they were not acting out of a purehearted motive. Maybe to one who has morally compromised too far, ignored one’s conscience rather more than most, the very laws of physics are different and one has no choice but to abide by a naturalistic view of the Cosmos because that’s how it is for one. That said, if this line of thought is pursued too far I suspect it will lead to victim-blaming.

There are a number of lists of siddhis. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika seems to mention ten, including things like ahimsa and samadhi, and many of them seem to be virtues rather than psychic powers. A number of other sources agree on a list of eight, including laghima, prapti, prakamya, anima, vasitva, mahima and vasitva (I’m not transliterating these strictly because it would make typing too difficult) plus kama-avasayitva or garima. These are respectively, and this is my interpretation, levitation, teleportation, the ability to have whatever one desires, miniaturisation, the ability to control people, enlargement and the ability to control forces of nature, plus overcoming desires or the ability to become infinitely heavy. These sound completely unbelievable on the whole, and we’re warned that they are only powers in a worldly way, and elsewhere there’s the tradition that these should not be used as parlour tricks. The link between virtues and more material siddhis seems to indicate that the ability, for example, to be completely non-violent is as great an achievement as teleportation, and I can believe that. However, the implication is also that both are attainable. I suppose the way I see these, if I do entertain the more startling ones, is that they’re like the ability to lift a heavy weight off one’s child in extremis, and they certainly aren’t the intended destination, if there even is such a thing, of practicing Yoga.

Quite a few years ago, I considered studying the Qabbalah, and it seemed that the first stage was following the Torah perfectly. Since this is a pretty tall order and the fact that it was portrayed as the first step made me wonder what the point of the rest of the Tree of Life even was. I am aware that a distinction is often made between what is divinely required of us and what is virtuous, but if it operates to that extent it just seems like a distraction from doing the right thing.

Oddly, all of this is really a preamble to what I was actually planning to say here. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or “Effect” as I called it above, is something I’ve experienced in the past few days. After I wrote Orange I found myself noticing orange the colour and orange the fruit everywhere. This does not of course mean that the Law Of Attraction is bringing me oranges. It means I’m experiencing the Baader-Meinhof Effect. This is a cognitive bias where after noticing something once, one starts to perceive it everywhere, laying one open to the conclusion that its frequency of occurrence has increased. According to Wikipedia, this was made famous by a man in 1994 hearing about the Baader Meinhof Gang for the first time, then coincidentally found it mentioned elsewhere shortly after. I can remember when our first child was on the way, Sarada and I both began to notice that there seemed to be pregnancy everywhere. However, clearly our child was not the first baby ever to be born in history. In the twenty-first (Christian) century, the Baader Meinhof Phenomenon was renamed the “frequency illusion”, possibly because not many people know what the Baader Meinhof Group was any more, although even in 1994 they were probably quite obscure. It’s considered to be a combination of confirmation and selective attention biasses. It’s suggested here that the BME is useful for creative writing as it leads one to focus on confirmatory experiences and pick up little bits of info which can be woven into a story. Presumably this means I could currently benefit from writing a story about oranges, but Jeanette Winterson already kinda did that.

But who were the Baader-Meinhof Group?

Well, back in the day there used to be rather a lot of paramilitary organisations who were sufficiently frustrated by the political process that they decided the only solution was to engage in violent action against the established social order, an idea I’m generally in sympathy with except for the violence, and one of these was the Rote Armee Fraktion. In the late 1960s, the establishment had committed the error of giving baby boomers a higher education in large numbers, and the result was that a lot of middle class people became aware of the flaws in the system and decided to act against it. Ulrike Meinhof started out as a pacifist and an activist in the nuclear disarmament movement. Her pacifism was criticised by the Socialist Students’ League. This was in 1964. In ’68, she left her husband and job and met up with Andreas Baader, who had helped set fire to a department store in Frankfurt-am-Rhein as a protest against the public’s indifference to the genocide in Vietnam, and unlike the other members of the RAF hadn’t been to university. Thus was the Baader-Meinhof Group formed. They were largely seen as a terrorist group, at least outside Germany.

Within West Germany they had popular support among the younger generation. Part of their belief system was that the people who were now in positions of power in the Federal Republic, which tended to be seen as the successor state to the Third Reich as opposed to the DDR, had also been working a couple of decades earlier in the Nazi state, and were therefore seen as culpable. Consequently, all the kidnaps, robberies and the like were seen as justified by a large fraction of the German population and many of them said they’d help hide gang members. This situation is considerably different to other Western countries with similar groups at the time. After a considerable police operation, the first generation of the RAF were arrested and brought to trial. One of their judges was, unsurprisingly, an ex-Nazi party member. The RAF itself was anti-imperialist and saw itself as in solidarity with the people of the South.

That, then, is the actual Baader Meinhof group, which didn’t wish to go by that name and after Baader’s and Meinhof’s arrests probably shouldn’t’ve been called that anyway. They were, so far as I can tell, well-educated middle class individuals on the whole, though not entirely, who were fighting on behalf of a cause without actually being directly oppressed, and therefore questions regarding the justification of their violence seem justifiable to me. But in any case, this post isn’t about them but the effect named after them.

In statistics there’s a division between sensitive and specific tests. Sensitive tests are likely to detect when something is so, but will also sometimes falsely report that it is when it isn’t. Specific ones do the opposite: they are unlikely to report something is there when it isn’t but may miss it when it is. I have a tendency to be specific rather than sensitive in my thought, which is part of what makes my thinking style depressive and means I often miss opportunities because I can’t perceive them. However, this also means I’m relatively safe from imagining something is there when it isn’t, and you may wish to consider the fact that I’m theist in that setting. It means I’m unlikely to develop paranoia, which is supposed to be called something else nowadays.

Now imagine someone is diagnosable as paranoid or schizophrenic. If they experience the BME, if it’s about the wrong thing, that may feed their delusion, or they may feel it’s significant and become fixated on it. Almost everyone’s brain does it, but for some people the fact that their brain does it, interacting with their learned experience or the tendencies they already have in their thought, can make it problematic. It can also be problematic in the context of continuing professional development. If you’re a professional and you go on a course, when you come back off it you may be more likely to see the things you learnt about when they aren’t really there. You might also be careful to guard against that and end up missing it when it is there.

It’s also a problem in legal testimony. For instance, someone can become convinced that a suspect is innocent or guilty and develop the appropriate confirmation bias, and that could be a detective, barrister, juror or witness.

Finally, it illustrates how the brain is substantially a filter. Before I wrote ‘Orange’, I’m sure I encountered just as much orangeness and oranges as I’ve noticed since I published it. Today I noticed the flag of the Dutch Royal Family and realised that Dutch soccer strip was also orange. But what am I not noticing now which I will in a few months’ time when, say, a rope swing or lollipop suddenly becomes significant to me? It seems right now very hard to believe that I was encountering so many orangenesses without noticing them up until a few days ago, but obviously I was. I believe the brain is a filter in other ways too, but this has really brought home to me how startling and overwhelming sensory impressions and experiences could be if one allows it. I do know I make too many associations though.

The Anti-Universe

A prominent mythological theme is that of time being cyclical. For instance, in Hinduism there is a detailed chronology which repeats endlessly. Bearing in mind that the numbers used in mythological contexts are often mainly there to indicate enormity or tininess, there is the kalpa, which lasts 4 320 million years and is equivalent to a day in Brahma’s life. There are three hundred and sixty of these days in a Brahman year, and a hundred Brahman years in a Brahman lifetime, after which the cycle repeats. Within a Brahman Day, human history also repeats a cycle known as the Yuga Cycle, which consists of four ages, Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali. The names refer to the proportion of virtue and vice characterising each age, so Satya is perfect, life is long, everyone is kind to each other, wise, healthy and so on, satya meaning “truth” or “sincerity”, Treta is “third” in the sense of being three quarters virtue and one quarter vice, Dvapara is two quarters of each and Kali, unsurprisingly the current age, is the age of evil and destruction. Humans start off as giants and end as dwarfs. Then the cycle repeats. Thus there are cycles within cycles in Hindu cosmology.

The Maya also have a cyclical chronology, including the Long Count, in a cycle lasting 63 million years. Probably the most important cycle in Mesoamerican calendars is the fifty-two year one, during which the two different calendars cycle in and out of sync with each other. The Aztecs used to give away all their possessions at the end of that period in the expectation that the world might come to an end.

The Jewish tradition has a few similar features as well. Firstly, it appears to use the ages of people to indicate their health and the decline of virtue. The patriarchs named in the Book of Genesis tend to have shorter and shorter lives leading up to the Flood, which ends the lives of the last few generations before it, including the 969-year old Methuselah. Giants are also mentioned in the form of the Nephilim, although they are seen as evil. I wonder if this reflects the inversion of good and evil which took place when Zoroastrianism began, where previously lauded deities were demonised. There is also a cycle in the practice of the Jubilee, consisting of a forty-nine year Golden Jubilee and a shorter seven year Jubilee, and obviously there are the seven-day weeks, which we still have in the West.

The Hindu series of Yugas also reflects the Greek tradition of Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages, which was ultimately adopted into modern archæology in modified form as the Three-Age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron. The crucial difference between the Hindu and Greek age system and our own ideas of history is that they both believed in steady decline whereas we tend to be more mixed. We tend to believe in progress, although our ideas of what constitutes that do vary quite a lot. In a way, it makes more sense to suppose that everything will get worse, although since history is meant to be cyclical it can also be expected to get better, because of the operation of entropy. Things age, wear out, run down, burn out and so on, and this is the regular experience for everyone, no matter when they’re living in history, and it makes sense that the world might be going in the same direction. On the longest timescale of course it is, because the Sun will burn out, followed by all other stars and so on.

Twentieth century cosmology included a similar theory, that of the oscillating Universe. It was considered possible that the quantity of mass in the Universe was sufficient that once it got past a certain age, gravity acting between all the masses in existence would start to pull everything back together again until it collapsed into the same hot, dense state which started the Universe in the first place. There then emerge a couple of issues. Would the Universe then bounce back and be reborn, only to do it again in an endless cycle? If each cycle is an exact repetition, does it even mean anything to say it’s a different Universe, or is it just the same Universe with time passing in a loop?

This is not currently a popular idea because it turns out that there isn’t enough mass in the Universe to cause it to collapse against the Dark Energy which is pushing everything apart, so ultimately the objects in the Universe are expected to become increasingly isolated until there is only one galaxy visible in each region of the Universe where space is expanding relatively more slowly than the speed of light. This has a significant consequence. A species living in a galaxy at that time would be unaware that things had ever been different. There would be no evidence available to suggest that it was because we can currently see the galaxies receding, and therefore we can know that things will be like that one day, but they would have no way to discover that they hadn’t always been like this. This raises the question of what we might have lost. We reconstruct the history of the Universe based on the data available to us, and we’re aware that we’re surrounded by galaxies which, on the very large scale, are receding from each other, so we can imagine the film rewinding and all the stars and galaxies, or what will become them, starting off in the same place. But at that time, how do we know there wasn’t evidence of something we can no longer recover which is crucial to our own understanding of the Universe?

Physics has been in a bit of a strange state in recent decades. Because the levels of energy required cannot be achieved using current technology, the likes of the Large Hadron Collider are not powerful enough to provide more than a glimpse of the fundamental nature of physical reality. Consequently, physicists are having to engage in guesswork without much feedback, and this applies also to their conception of the entire Universe. I’ve long been very suspicious about the very existence of non-baryonic dark matter. Dark matter was originally proposed as a way to explain why galaxies rotate as if they have much more gravity than their visible matter, i.e. stars, is exerting. In fact, if gravity operates over a long range in the same way as it does over short distances, such as within this solar system or between binary stars, something like nine-tenths of the mass is invisible. To some extent this can be explained by ordinary matter such as dust, planets or very dim stars, and there are also known subatomic particles such as the neutrinos which are very common but virtually undetectable. The issue I have with non-baryonic dark matter, and I’ve been into this before on here, is that it seems to be a specially invented kind of matter to fill the gap in the model which, however, is practically undetectable. There’s another possible solution. What makes this worse is that dark matter is now being used to argue for flaws in the general theory of relativity, when it seems very clear that the problem is actually that physicists have proposed the existence of a kind of substance which is basically magic.

If you go back to the first moment of the Universe, there is a similar issue. Just after the grand unification epoch, a sextillionth (long scale) of a second after the Big Bang, an event is supposed to have taken place which increased each of the three extensive dimensions of the Universe by a factor of the order of one hundred quintillion in a millionth of a yoctosecond. If you don’t recognise these words, the reason is that these are unusually large and small quantities, so their values aren’t that important. Some physicists think this is fishy, because again something seems to have been simply invented to account for what happened in those circumstances without there being other reasons for supposing it to be so. They therefore decided to see what would happen if they used established principles to recreate the early Universe, and in particular they focussed on CPT symmetry

CPT symmetry is Charge, Parity and Temporal symmetry, and can be explained thus, starting with time. Imagine a video of two billiard balls hitting and bouncing off each other out of context. It would be difficult to tell whether that video was being played forwards or backwards. This works well on a small scale, perhaps with two neutrons colliding at about the speed of sound at an angle to each other, or a laser beam reflecting off a mirror. Charge symmetry means that if you observe two equally positively and negatively charged objects interacting, you could swap the charges and still observe the same thing, or for that matter two objects with the same charge could have the opposite charges and still do the same thing. Finally, parity symmetry is the fact that you can’t tell whether what you’re seeing is the right way up or upside down, or reflected. All of these things don’t work in the complicated situations we tend to observe because of pesky things like gravity and accidentally burning things out by sticking batteries in the wrong way round or miswiring plugs, but in sufficiently simple situations all of these things are symmetrical.

But there is a problem. The Universe as a whole doesn’t seem to obey these laws of symmetry. For instance, almost everything we come across seems to be made of matter even though there doesn’t seem to be any reason why there should be more matter than antimatter or the other way round, and time tends to go forwards rather than backwards on the whole. One attempt to explain why matter seems to dominate the Universe is that for some reason in the early Universe more matter was created than antimatter, and since matter meeting antimatter annihilates both, matter is all that’s left. Of course antimatter does crop up from time to time, for instance in bananas and thunderstorms, but it doesn’t last long because it pretty soon comes across an antiparticle in the form of, say, an electron, and the two wipe each other off the map in a burst of energy.

These physicists proposed a solution which does respect this symmetry and allows time to move both forwards and backwards. They propose that the Big Bang created not one but two universes, one where time runs forwards and mainly made of matter and the other where time goes backwards and is mainly made of antimatter, and also either of these universes is geometrically speaking a reflection of the other, such as all the left-handed people in one being right-handed in the other. This explains away the supposèd excess of matter. There’s actually just as much antimatter as matter, but it swapped over at the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang, time was running backwards and the Universe was collapsing.

In a manner rather similar to the thought that an oscillating Universe could be practically the same as time running in a circle because each cycle might be identical and there’s no outside to see it from, the reversed, mirror image antimatter Universe is simply this one running backwards with, again, nothing on the outside to observe it with, and therefore for all intents and purposes there just is this one Universe running forwards after the Big Bang, because it’s indistinguishable from the antimatter one running backwards. On the other hand, the time dimension involved is the same as this one, and therefore it could just be seen as the distant past, which answers the question of what there was before the Big Bang: there was another universe, or rather there was this universe. It also means everything has already happened.

But a further question arises in my head too, and this is by no means what these physicists are claiming. As mentioned above, one model of the Universe is that it repeats itself in a cycle. What we may have here is theoretical support for the idea of a Universe collapsing in on itself before expanding again. That’s the bit we can see or deduce given currently available evidence. However, in the future, certain evidence will be lost because there will only be one visible galaxy observable, and the idea of space expanding will be impossible to support even though it is. What if one of the bits of evidence we’ve already lost is of time looping? Or, what if time just does loop anyway? What if time runs forwards until the Universe reaches a maximum size and then runs backwards again as it contracts? There is an issue with this. There isn’t enough mass in the Universe for it to collapse given the strength of dark energy pushing it apart, but of course elsewhere in the Multiverse there could be looping universes due to different physical constants such as the strength of dark energy or the increased quantity of matter in them, because in fact as has been mentioned before there are possible worlds where this does take place. Another question then arises: how does time work between universes? Are these looping universes doing so now in endless cycles, or are they repeating the same stretch of time? Does time even work that way in the Multiverse, or is it like in Narnia, where time runs at different speeds relative to our world?

It may seem like I’ve become highly speculative. In my defence, I’d say this. I have taken pains to ignore my intuition in the past because I believed it was misleading. However, there appears to be an intuition among many cultures that time does run in a cycle, and the numbers these cultures produce are oddly similar. The Mayan calendar’s longest time period is the Alautun, which lasts 63 081 429 years, close to the number of years it’s been since the Chicxulub Impact, which coincidentally was nearby and wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. The Indian kalpa is 4 320 million years in length, which is again quite close to the age of this planet. Earth is 4 543 million years old and the Cretaceous ended 66 million years ago, so these figures are 4.6% out in the case of the Maya and 5% for the kalpa. Of course it may be coincidence, and the idea of time being cyclical may simply be based on something like the cycle of the day and night or the seasons through the year, but since I believe intuitive truths are available in Torah and the rest of the Tanakh, I don’t necessarily have a problem with other sources. Parallels have of course been made between ancient philosophies and today’s physics before, for example by Fritjof Capra in his ‘The Tao [sic] Of Physics’. Although much of what he says has been rubbished by physicists since, there is a statue of Dancing Shiva in the lobby at CERN and one quote from Capra is widely accepted:

“Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.”

Insufficient Wuthering

I’ve been a fan of Kate Bush since the beginning of her career in 1978. I think I identify with her general weirdness and artiness, and her birthday is the same as mine although she’s older than I am. She’s also from Kent, like me, but of course she’s far more successful and famous than me or most of the people I know. At the age of thirteen I wrote an essay for school about how I regarded her as a rôle model, so that’s one of those things you can keep behind your ear.

Nor am I alone, even now. In recent years there has been an annual re-enactment of her interpretive dance routine from the ‘Wuthering Heights’ video, where hundreds of people gather in open spaces all over the world to recreate that moment at the beginning of her fame:

I don’t know if this is widely known, but Emily Brontë shares Ms Bush’s and my birthday, and I presume there’s a link there although I haven’t come across her explicitly mentioning that so far as I can remember.

During the early days of the lockdown, I decided to use the ‘Wuthering Heights’ routine as a kind of exercise programme. It proved to be fairly successful but not particularly energetic, and strong though my attachment to the woman and her music is, I’d probably do better copying someone like Dua Lipa. That said, I do believe dance is a potential key to keeping fit in the circumstances I’ve been in over the past few years, though not the only one.

I took up long distance running as a teenager at secondary school. I used to enjoy it, partly because it had no explicit element of competition or aggression. From about the age of twelve, I used to run the thirteen kilometre annual sponsored walk and it kind of developed from there. It may be partly down to my ADHD, but I just couldn’t be doing with plodding along the whole route at walking speed. From the age of fourteen I used to swim a kilometre each Sunday at the local swimming pool, Kingsmead. I walked from school every day, a distance of around five kilometres, and I used to run on Wednesday afternoons. From January ’85, when I was seventeen, I used to get up at 5 am each morning. However, I have never made a huge effort to increase my distance, duration or stamina, although I do walk almost everywhere under about ten kilometres, including to and from all my clients as home visits. It isn’t massively energetic, but it’s something, and I actually consider it to be fairly normal, though perhaps less so in recent years in heavily industrialised countries such as this one.

Or I did. Once I started caring for my father, it became more difficult to get out of the house for protracted periods of time due to his demands on me, which could possibly come at any time of the day or night. At the start of 2019 I did Couch to 5K, which I eventually built up to running seventeen kilometres in a single day, though not in one go. However, the point did not come by which I no longer regarded it as a chore. It was good to have done it, but never really good to do it. Just a relief to get it over with really. I also injured myself a few times, and I think there’s a trade-off there between fitness and injury because it seems that any kind of strenuous activity is likely to lead to injury, and once that’s happened it stops you from exercising while you recover.

At the opposite end of all this is Yoga, or rather Hatha Yoga. This I started when I was about four, which is apparently too young. I was able to follow it off a TV programme and had no idea what I was doing. Later on, when I was maybe eleven, I followed various books on the subject, and adopted some of the other practices such as kriyas and meditation. Eventually of course, I married someone who was deeply involved in Yoga and became a Yoga teacher. A number of issues arise with it. Firstly, at the time and since, fundamentalist Christians decided it was evil and Satanic, as they did lots of other things such as heavy metal music and Dungeons And Dragons. Secondly, it became heavily commercialised and commodified and tended to drift in the direction of sports and away from a spiritual practice, to the extent that people tend to ask you what kind of Yoga you practice, expecting an answer like “Bikram” or something when that isn’t what Yoga is about. It’s like asking someone who takes herbal remedies whether they get their stuff from Holland And Barrett. Finally, there’s the weird issue of cultural appropriation and Yoga, which I suspect is focussed mainly on what I can only think of as “degenerate” Yoga, perhaps not even deserving of a capital Y, i.e. the likes of the aforementioned Bikram Yoga, where they try to sell rich White Westerners as much as possible on the side of accoutrements, which is just despicable really. But I honestly don’t see how Yoga can be cultural appropriation, because to me Yoga is part of the fabric of reality. It isn’t just about asanas, and in fact some traditional Yoga practitioners disapprove even of doing asanas because they see them as glorifying the body, which should only be a temporary vessel encumbering the soul on its way to Nirvana. I’m not of that ilk. However, I’m aware that we got our concept of zero and place value from India via the Arab world, and I don’t consider mathematics using Western Arabic numerals to be cultural appropriation, so why would Yoga be? Quantum physics and relativity doesn’t belong to the West and attempts to address fundamental truths about reality, and so does Yoga. What’s the difference? Unfortunately I tend to honour Yoga more on a theoretical level and don’t pursue it much, although I do incorporate some asanas into my life in a kind of “first aid” therapeutic way, such as vrksasana to improve my balance, twists to deal with digestive issues and so forth.

The third form of exercise I’ve already mentioned, and is dancing. From about the age of fifteen to twenty-five, I used to dance a lot, go clubbing over some of that time and so forth. I don’t think I’m a good dancer by any means but I did very much adopt the idea of “dance like nobody’s watching”. I’ve even gone so far as to dance on stage, spontaneously. Although I’m aware that there’s a lot of theory and practice around dance, I know very little about any of that. There’s something out there called Labanotation, for example, and of course interpretive dance, and I did square dancing and maypole dancing at school and Scottish country dancing at a wedding once. The rest is just disco dancing. I will say one thing. Dance music and other pop or rock music swaps over in its greatness when you dance to it as opposed to listening to it. There are dance tracks which sound truly dreadful if you’re just sitting there listening to them which are absolutely awesome when you get up and dance to them, and also brilliant pieces of music for listening to which become totally dire when you try to dance. There’s another aspect, particularly to disco, which only dawned on me in recent years. As a White person I was kind of trained subtly to hate disco, but the thing is that disco is, albeit commercialised, Black, Latinx and Gay music, and this should be taken into consideration before one judges as a White straight person.

A common factor in all of these, probably due to lack of knowledge and being driven by enthusiasm rather than skill, is that I regularly seem to injure my knees to a limited extent. When I was younger, running on hard surfaces was supposed to be a big no-no, because it was thought to damage the joints generally. I don’t know what I think about this now. It’s apparently no longer thought to be the case, but I get the distinct impression that when I do this, it does seem to cause some kind of mild injury. However, one aspect of running and other similar forms of exercise is that they do induce mild inflammation and other types of injury temporarily which, I presume, makes the body stronger and healthier in the long term, so maybe that’s the influence here. Likewise with asanas in Yoga, when I was younger and didn’t know what I was doing. I used to twist my knees sideways rather un-physiologically and I wonder if this has had a long-term effect. It also happened with disco dancing and even cycling. After a night of solid dancing, I would often find that my knees in particular ached.

There was a time when I was both practicing asanas and running a lot, and I found that the increase in muscle tone and strength interfered with my suppleness. I think there may be a further trade-off here, and the question then arises of whether the joints need that support, as with the shoulder girdle in particular. I found that I preferred to be supple than strong. Presumably there are many people out there with hypermobility issues for whom this constitutes a real problem.

Overarching this entire thing of exercise, which is of course generally good for mental wellbeing if it doesn’t become an addiction, is a long-term reluctance to do any of it, which I found in particular set in during lockdown, and I’m now back in the position of being a couch potato. Some of this is situational, because it’s difficult to get out of the house for long, but as I’ve mentioned significant parts of my regimen, if it’s worthy of that name, could be undertaken indoors without any real issues, so what is it that’s stopping me? Is it low-level depression of some kind, or not feeling like I have enough space and time to myself? Is it a need to comfort eat? I wonder how many other people this affects. I also think it would be easier to move my father around if I had better muscle tone, as right now I don’t think it does either of us much good.

On this occasion then, I have a question for you in the interests of research: have you found yourself more reluctant to exercise as the pandemic situation goes on? I see lots of people run past the house, but how representative are they? What, again, is going on inside people’s homes which I don’t see? Let me know.

States Of Consciousness

Photo by KoolShooters on Pexels.com

This was almost about near-death experiences (NDEs), and may still go on to include them, but primarily the task I’ve set myself today is to describe states of consciousness and their possible relationship with reality. This has been of interest to me since soon after I started meditating, which must have been over forty years ago, and my thoughts on the matter are not necessarily particularly up to date because I’ve thought about them in a fairly piecemeal manner. This may in fact be the first time I’ve actually expressed myself clearly on the matter.

Okay, so there are maybe about seven clearly separated states of consciousness which may blur into each other. These are: wakefulness, REM sleep, NREM sleep, samadhi (meditation trance), dreaming, hypnosis and Ganzfeld. Of these, hypnosis may not exist, something which I’ll cover later. Ganzfeld probably needs some explanation. The Ganzfeld Effect is what happens when one is deprived of sensory stimulation, as in a floatation tank or with special blindfolds in an anechoic chamber, and involves the projection of hallucinations into one’s subjective space. As such, it seems to resemble Charles Bonnet Syndrome. More on that later. Each of these is characterised by particular brainwave patterns. There are also intermediate states such as sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, false awakening, near-death experiences and dementia with Lewy bodies. My own experience of B12 deficiency suggests that it can be quite similar to the dementia, and schizophrenia and delirium might also belong there. Therefore, a bit like the gender landscape, it might make more sense to think of consciousness as a plain with peaks representing the different states.

Most of the time I’m focussed on the distinction

Most of the time I’m focussed on the distinction between dreaming and wakefulness. I try to avoid prioritising one of these states over the other, because I think that phenomenologically both are equally valid and represent different relationships with reality. I also talk about dreaming in the present tense, although this is substantially because I don’t think English has a tense which can refer to dreaming accurately. Dreams are timeless in the same way as numbers and abstract concepts are, so if there’s a language with a way of expressing verbs timelessly, so that for instance the “is” in “two plus two equals four” is not in the present tense, I’d be using that method. It’s also supposed to make lucid dreaming more likely if one does this. I mentioned yesterday that Dennett has the view that dreams are not experiences but false memories. That is, on awakening one has a particular brain state which the waking mind interprets as consisting of apparent past experiences which occurred after falling asleep. But it’s the waking state that perceives it this way. Because dreaming and waking are equal, this fact, being a product of wakeful consciousness, is no more valid than dreaming experience.

Years on the Halfbakery ideas bank, have convinced me that ideas are discovered rather than invented, and that discovery and invention are the same thing. Hence at some point in the distant past people discovered the wheel. This makes sense, for example, when one thinks of Charles Fort’s idea of “steam engine time”. There is apple blossom or cherry blossom time, when all the trees of a certain species come into blossom at once even if they’re thousands of kilometres apart. Similarly, at least three civilisations have independently developed the steam engine because it was the right season for doing so. The various pieces of the jigsaw fell into place and the shape of the gap remaining became apparent. Likewise people come up with remarkably similar novels without apparent connections, such as possibly ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ and ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ or ‘The Hermes Fall’ and ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’. Likewise, dreams are “out there” waiting to be had, perhaps only by one particular individual. Hence they don’t happen on a particular night but one wakes up having discovered a dream which was always, and will always be, there, though more strictly outside spacetime, wherever numbers and steam engines dwell before we open a conduit to them and our world. Somewhere sub specie æternitatis, Everyperson is having tea with the Queen. The reason lucid dreaming, conscious control of dreaming, is important is that it amounts to Heaven, whereas nightmares amount to Hell.

I don’t want to make this post entirely about dreaming, although I have more carefully developed ideas about that state than others. That said, there are supposed to be tests for dreaming, one of which I try in a recently remembered dream. I took a shard of mirror and looked at myself through it, and not only was part of my face clearly reflected in it but it moved appropriately when I held the shard at different angles. This detail has caused me to doubt that the tests are reliable, and it also amazes me that my brain is able to produce an image that realistic, although I’ve successfully done that in Ganzfeld.

I will say just one more thing about dreaming and wakefulness. There are mixed states where both are involved. For instance, when I had B12 deficiency I began to enter a psychotic state involving phantosmia and anosmia. I constantly hallucinated the odour of peppermint and sometimes confused dreams and wakefulness when I first woke up in the mornings. Objects and people in my dreams appeared in the room I was sleeping in (which was the living room incidentally, but that’s another story). This is similar to dementia with Lewy bodies, where older people cease to distinguish clearly between dreaming and waking life. Bearing in mind that these people’s lives are approaching their end, it raises questions about near-death experiences. Finally there’s Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where deteriorating vision leads to patterns or even detailed scenery involving people and places. This is similar to the phantom limb phenomenon in my opinion, and also to tinnitus and hearing voices in some ways. All of these are somewhat dreamlike.

They’re also similar to Ganzfeld. This is a state of consciousness which results from uniform sensory stimulation or the lack of stimulation entirely, and is sometimes sought by people in floatation tanks and anechoic chambers, as mentioned above. The brain amplifies neural noise and turns it into complex visual impressions, I would imagine very similar to Charles Bonnet Syndrome. It can also be done using white noise, which I’ve tried myself and found I could hear music in it after about half an hour. It also constitutes a second way into lucid dreaming, so I’m told, because apparently if you lie still in bed in a cold dark room for at least half an hour you will begin to have these impressions. I don’t know how easy other people find lying still, or lying still without falling asleep, and I know that I’m supposed to be genetically predisposed to moving around a lot during sleep and to having restless legs, so it’s unlikely that I will find a way in this way. There is a Tibetan Buddhist practice known as mun mtshams (I cannot currently write this in Tibetan script but it might be མུནཚམྶ​), involving shutting oneself away in the dark alone as practice for dealing with བར་དོ and realising  འཇའ་ལུས་, thereby, I presume, avoiding reincarnation. This is rather reminiscent of the use of lucid dreaming for a similar end.

And that brings me to samadhi, समाधी. I should point out at this point that my own opinions and experience of समाधी seem to be different from what other people say about it. This is the meditative state of Raja Yoga, and I expect Sarada will have things to say about this. My understanding of how to enter this state is that it tends to be easier in certain asanas, such as Padmasana of course but also others such as Sukhasana, then one practices Pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses, followed by focussing on a mantra or other object of thought and grasping its essence, then removing that essence entirely, leaving consciousness in a non-intentional state. I’m told that this is not what Samadhi is, and that the Christian understanding that this is in fact the nature of Samadhi is a major reason for seeing Yoga as Satanic. The fact, phenomenologically speaking, that for me it’s a state of consciousness without an object of consciousness has made me sceptical about Brentano’s analysis of mental states, where he insists that they are a number of things I do agree with, including incorrigibility (cannot be doubted) and having a number of other properties including “aboutness”, which is in fact generally considered the most important quality of mental states. This is what’s rather unhelpfully referred to as Intentionality (with a capital I, constrasted with “intentionality”) and may or may not be the same as intensionality with an S, which is to do with meaning and contrasted with extensionality. Presumably Pratyahara could also be used to enter Ganzfeld if one was so inclined. I understand that other people use the word samadhi to refer to a consciousness of unity with the object of meditation or even the Cosmos or God, and I’ve experienced that too but tend to perceive it as pathological, for me anyway. It’s unwelcome and seems unhealthy to me. In Buddhism, this state of consciousness is the last element of the Noble Eightfold Path. I can’t really do justice to all of this here, partly because I’m using words but also due to wanting to describe other states of consciousness. Because I try to balance the value of different states, the idea that this is a higher state is hard to come to terms with, but its role within dharmic spirituality has always been prized. The reason many Christians disapprove of it is that they believe an empty mind, which is how they see this, invites Satan or evil spirits in. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that I don’t respond to psilocybin, the only psychedelic I’ve taken, so this may reflect my atttitude towards samadhi.

Hypnosis may or may not be a state of consciousness. My own view is that it’s stateless and a form of role-play, although that has a function as serious as many others in spirituality and other aspects of life. I’m also suspicious of hypnosis being misused because I think many symptoms are there for a reason and removing them outside the context of hypnotherapy would be likely to lead to the underlying cause being manifested in a different and unpredictable way. Interestingly, Sarada thinks exactly the same thing about lucid dreaming. Having said that, I do believe hypnotherapists are usually professional and take pains doesn’t happen. I used to practice hypnosis for fun when I was about twelve, quite successfully, but that was probably reckless and irresponsible, and I’ve also done self-hypnosis. An early non-state definition of hypnosis was offered in 1941 by R. W. White: “Hypnotic behaviour is meaningful, goal-directed striving, its most general goal being to behave like a hypnotised person as this is continuously defined by the operator and understood by the client”. That said, there are changes in brainwave activity in some hypnotised individuals, and the question of how it causes amnesia occurs to me.

The seventh state, which I have yet to discuss, is NREM sleep, also known as dreamless or orthodox sleep. This is in some ways the odd one out, as it seems to involve the absence of consciousness. There is no paralysis and the parasympathetic (P for Peace) nervous system is dominant during it. The EEG shows theta waves and sleep spindles, which are rapid bursts of electrical activity building to a crescendo and then declining. Theta waves occur at four to eight times a second. Delta waves are prominent. There are also K-complexes, which are the highest voltage physiological spikes of electrical activity in the human brain. I have more of these than most people because they’re associated with restless legs syndrome, but have no idea what their significance is. It doesn’t seem possible to describe NREM sleep phenomenologically because it seems to lack phenomenology entirely, but since I’m panpsychist this is either a challenge to my beliefs or means I must assert that consciousness is there, just as it is everywhere else, but in a similar way to how it would inhere in an organism with nothing analogous to a nervous system. To be honest I don’t know what to do with NREM.

On the subject of brainwaves, it’s probably worthwhile describing this kind of activity with respect to the other states. Dreaming is closer to wakefulness than NREM in this respect, hence its other name, paradoxical sleep. Theta and gamma activity is widepread and the brain stem seems to initiate activity in this state, suggesting to some that dreaming is an attempt by the conscious mind to make sense of vegetative neural processes in the absence of sensory stimulation of other kinds, which makes sense because so many dreams involve frustration and paralysis of some description. In meditation, alpha and theta waves are more active, and with habitual meditation it used to be thought there were permanent changes but recent findings have not shown this to be so. However, habitual meditators’ brains do age more slowly with respect to memory. The possibly related mindfulness is said to have a number of disadvantages, including over-exertion, ignoring intuition, exacerbating anxiety and triggering depersonalisation. It isn’t clear to me how close mindfulness and samadhi are to each other though.

Hypnosis shows more active alpha waves, but these are often used in imaginative states so it may not indicate that it’s a separate state of consciousness.

Another possible approach to consciousness is to see them as phases like those of matter, which can perhaps be shown on a graph. This has been done, for example, with meditation. Denis Postle has attempted to model the different states of consciousness on the butterfly catastrophe graph, which has four axes. Unfortunately I can only remember arousal and relaxation. Catastrophe theory has gone out of fashion nowadays because although it’s valid, there are few situations which can be reduced to only a few significant parameters. Whether that’s true of consciousness I don’t know. Even so, the idea of there being some kind of space or hyperspace with regions corresponding to different states of consciousness seems to be a good one.

There are also other states of consciousness which we may potentially have but don’t experience in everyday life. For instance, there is a case of a hiker who fell off a path in a remote area and was found alive long after he could be expected to have succumbed to exposure, and it’s thought that he may have entered an obscure state of hibernation. There is one known species of primate who does hibernate, the fat-tailed dwarf lemur. It is of course much more common in other mammals, but for humans this state could be useful for long haul space travel, so if we were ever going to do that, and we aren’t of course, it would be worthwhile looking into. Speaking of space travel, the question of out of body experiences as a separate state of consciousness arises. Is astral travel a distinct state or is it more like dreaming or Ganzfeld? Then there are NDEs. Soon after the heart stops, the brain enters a state whose electrical activity resembles that of NREM sleep, followed by a final burst of sudden activity as the neurones cease to be able to compensate for their increasingly hostile environment and lose their polarisation. That could also be a separate state of consciousness in its own right.

To conclude then, I haven’t really done this subject justice in the limited time and attention span available, but one final thought does occur. Is it right for me not to prioritise any state of consciousness over any other? Most people would probably say samadhi is a higher state than the others, but on the other hand Tibetan Buddhism appears to employ Ganzfeld as such a state, and there are also trance-like ecstatic states used in other forms of spirituality which might correspond more to hypnosis, if that is indeed a state. Whatever is the best way to arrange these, it certainly seems worthwhile to consider their relationships with each other and also with reality. I feel I’ve done this quite thoroughly with dreaming and wakefulness, but not the rest, and it definitely seems like a valuable exercise.

What do you think?